Braided Relations, Entwined Lives ― The Women of Charleston's Urban Slave Society

"[A] stunning, deeply researched, and gracefully written social history." —Leslie Schwalm, University of Iowa

This study of women in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, looks at the roles of women in an urban slave society. Cynthia M. Kennedy takes up issues of gender, race, condition (slave or free), and class and examines the ways each contributed to conveying and replicating power. She analyses what it meant to be a woman in a world where historically specific social classifications determined personal destiny and where at the same time people of color and white people mingled daily. Kennedy’s study examines the lives of the women of Charleston and the variety of their attempts to negotiate the web of social relations that ensnared them.

Cynthia M. Kennedy is Associate Professor of History at Clarion University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the history of slavery and U.S. women’s history.